robotic interface designers

Abstract: Computer-use agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting screens and executing keyboard and mouse actions. However, games, with their visually rich worlds and diverse mechanics, remain challenging and offer a demanding next step toward general digital control. Current game-agent learning pipelines often rely on large-scale demonstrations with limited coverage of dynamic game states, while scalable environments for interactive training remain difficult to obtain. We introduce Player-1, a post-training framework for learning game control beyond demonstrations through synthetic experience. We extend the computer-use action space with relative pointer motion, sustained inputs, and composite actions. For supervised initialization, we fine-tune computer-use models on 6,044 curated gameplay trajectories that pair recorded actions with task instructions and visual reasoning. We construct Player-1-Gym, sixteen synthetic 2D and 3D environments designed around control demands shared across games. Programmatically verifiable rewards and randomized observations and control dynamics support multi-environment reinforcement learning with PPO. The resulting Player-1-9B and Player-1-35B-A3B improve MineDojo-300 success over their SFT policies by 27.8 and 17.7 percentage points, respectively. Player-1-9B reaches 38.33% success compared with 12.63% for the strongest evaluated baseline, with further gains over SFT on ViZDoom-10 and GameWorld. Further analyses show that broader synthetic environment coverage improves transfer, while the use of composite actions that combine multiple keyboard and mouse inputs increases during RL. We demonstrate that learning from synthetic experience substantially improves game control beyond supervised initialization, with gains that generalize beyond the RL training suite.

Abstract: Unlike most intensely physical pursuits, surgical robotic teleoperation training focuses primarily on task outcomes rather than surgeon body posture or biomechanics during task completion. Toward the question of the role of biomechanics in surgical expertise, we sought to characterize the articular motion of expert teleoperators as compared to novice users. Twenty-seven novices and nine experts completed a non-medical cylinder-on-peg transfer task while their upper limb biomechanics were recorded via motion trackers. During more difficult motions, experts stabilized their wrist motion more than novices, while maintaining adequate range of motion in their shoulder and elbow and completing the task significantly faster than novices. This marker of expertise suggests the importance of attention to user biomechanics during teleoperation of surgical robots.